Our struggle is to bring social, political, and economic justice to our nation. This is an effort of the Chicano/Mexican American Digital History Project. https://sites.google.com/site/chicanodigital/

Saturday, August 19, 2017

Memories of Charlottesville

Memories of Charlottesville,

Palmer Foley

In 2016,
things fell apart. The center lost its hold, and the worst of the far Right,
full of passionate intensity, seemed poised to loose their blood-dimmed tide
upon the world. With cracks suddenly appearing in the
free-markets-and-phony-multiculturalism orthodoxy, Luxemburg’s old question was
suddenly, shockingly, back on the table: socialism or barbarism? And it
appeared barbarism had a considerable head start.

Four years
ago, I was a groom’s maid in my dear friends’ wedding in a little chapel in
Charlottesville. I’d spent many happy, moon-shining nights talking and walking
the streets of the college town, 45 minutes from my home in Richmond, VA. When
I learned armed fascists, confederates, white nationalists, and sundry other
scum, emboldened by the pandering faux-Bonapartist businessman in the White
House, were descending en masse on
the community, I was no longer thinking about long-game Left strategy. I only
knew we all had a duty.

The morning
of Saturday, August 12th was drizzling and miserable when our crew
from the Richmond DSA chapter set out. By the time we met up with other DSA
chapters in Charlottesville, the storm clouds had cleared. After precautions,
plans, and red armbands were shared, we set out for Emancipation Park. A
comrade handed me a button that read, “No Race But Human.”

In
search of some kind of heart in this heartless world, they got hooked on the
opium of the neckbeard: frothing, frustrated misogyny, paranoid xenophobia, and
elitist fantasies of the essential, primordial greatness of “their race” that
would be simply pathetic if they weren’t in lockstep continuity with great
historical evil.

And
they are cowards: the Right always
are.

Reactionary
huddling in your racial bunker is easy;

transforming the whole world is hard.

The
neoliberal elites wringing their hands now that they’ve finally seen the ugly
face under the mask of their status quo need to know: they bred these monsters.
Now we the people are going to have to defeat them.

No Trump! No KKK! No fascist USA!

Black
lives matter!

Whose
streets? Our streets!

We’ve held the corner for a
while, drowning out the fascists’ bile until they’ve passed…

I look behind me.

Armored-up
cops looming at the top of 2nd Street.

Better fall back to McGuffey –
the park joins the DSA in song:

In our hands is placed a power greater than
their hoarded gold,
Greater than the might of armies, multiplied a thousand-fold
We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old…

DSA members move as a red-lined
group to the First United Methodist Church to use the bathroom, drink water,
and take a quick breather –

Clergy, volunteers, bystanders,
Charlottesvilleans thank us for being here, they thank us for helping them
protect their community, for standing up to the fascists.

I can’t remember the last time
avowed socialists in the US were thanked
for anything –

Things
are changing.

And then as we’re leaving, I hear
a noise, look back down the sidewalk over my shoulder: a truck with the bed
full of armed Nazis had attempted to careen into the church parking lot, but
Antifa is chasing them off.

Things
are changing.

Every
car-sound now snaps my head to attention, sets my nerves on edge. Like most
trans women, I know how it feels to be hyper-vigilant walking the streets, but
I’ve never had to scope out every passing vehicle for Nazi shields and assault rifles.

We
get a tip that some fascists are headed to terrorize the residents of
Friendship Court, a nearby affordable housing neighborhood.

DSA,
Black Lives Matter, and others march off,

form
a mass at the south side of the neighborhood, ready and waiting to help out the
community, but it looks like the fascists came from the north and the residents
let us know that they’ve defended themselves.

Another
mass of counter-protestors are streaming down Water Street, singing and
chanting –

We
head up 2nd Street and join them.

Looking
around me, I feel so proud, and so I feel so much love. I have not been with
the Democratic Socialists of America long. Most people I was marching
red-banded-arm-in-arm with, I had only met for the first time that morning. But
I knew that everyone there had my back, and I had theirs. Because no matter
what eternal-white-essence claptrap the racists peddle, solidarity is thicker
than blood. What you are is
irrelevant next to what you do, what
struggle you undertake to make this world a truly just and free place. The
fascists, for all their intimidation games, are
bound to lose: they’ve lashed themselves to the mast of their sinking ship of
defensive, divisive, particularistic Being, but we, the democratic Left, are the very wave of Becoming, and with
our tide rises limitless human possibility. I look down at that button pinned
to my vest: “No Race But Human.”

Marching
with my comrades down Water Street, we felt the power of people united in a
common cause crackling through us. I understood then solidarity is not some
tired cliché from old union songs: it’s the real movement of the masses
clenched into the fist of history.

And then,
just as we reached the corner of Water Street and 3rd, sounds I
can’t describe echoed through every eardrum.

At the time
of writing, the Internet Nazis, not content to mock and insult the comrade they
murdered, want to send their goons to Heather Heyer’s funeral service.